Category: Adventures in the Writing Life

The Dreaded Middle

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Beginnings are hard to write.

Endings are even harder to write.

But the hardest part of a book to write, hands down, is the middle.

The middle of the book is that part where ennui sets in, the part where you start to heartily dislike most of not all of your characters, or — if you still like them in spite of everything — the part where you become so tired of the fictional milieu you’ve embedded them in that you start to fantasize about lifting them out of it wholesale and giving them all jobs in a coffee shop instead.  The middle is where plots break down, where minor characters show up out of nowhere and attempt to hijack the narrative, where major characters suddenly take left turns into unmapped territory.

Sometimes the plot breakdown is obvious when you hit it, and you end up stalled for days or weeks or sometimes, heaven help you, years, until you work out what’s holding things up.  Other times, you don’t notice it until it’s time to do the revisions, and then you’re stuck doing a massive structural rewrite on a short deadline.

One way or another, with novels it’s the midgame that makes or breaks people.

It’s All in the Search Terms

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

An actual conversation that took place in the office here, a couple of books back:

My co-author to me: I know that the term “latrine” didn’t come into use until World War I, when the Army got it from the French. What did they call them during the Civil War?

Me: Um. Let me look around and find out.

(Sound of typing, as I Google “US Army sanitary regulations Civil War” and find, in short order, a reference to a text entitled Customs of Service for Non-Commissioned Officers and Soldiers, written in 1864 by a Brigadier-General August Kreutz, which includes a section on camp cleanliness. A little more Googling, and I have the text itself.)

Me: The word was “sinks.”  God, I love research.

I also love the internet.  Back in the olden time, locating an obscure text like that would have required a visit to a university research library and some quality time spent with the card catalog — and while I enjoy roaming at will through the stacks as much as any bibliophile, it’s not something easily done when you live in a small town an hour and fifteen minutes north of the nearest traffic light.

Writers’ Tools

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Writers need their good tools as much as any other crafts-person.  A few of my favorites:

That slow cooker I mentioned a couple of days ago.  It’s especially useful in hot weather, and on days when I’m so busy and/or so tired that I have only minimal brain space left for stuff like food and cooking.

A good word processor.  And by “good” I mean, “suited to your own preferences and writing habits.”  Also, a good word processor for generating text and a good word processor for formatting text are not necessarily the same program.

A good printer.  It’s not as necessary as it used to be for a working writer’s printer to be a heavy-duty workhorse capable of printing out 600-pages-and-up inside of 12 hours without breaking down or running out of ink — I think it’s been at least half a dozen books now, maybe more, since we turned in anything in hardcopy — but there are still times when you’ll need a printer, and when you do you’ll want one that doesn’t give up on you in mid-crisis.

A good computer, one with enough hard drive space to store your stuff and enough memory to do the things you need to do.

And all the little things — the red pencils, the index cards, the colored highlighters, the nice fountain pens, and so on — that ease a writer’s heart and make the process of composition easier.

What are your favorite or indispensable tools?

The Fanfic Thing

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

The Guardian (or one of its on-line columnists, at any rate), has discovered the existence of fanfic, and the predictable kerfuffle has ensued.  This moves me to repost here some of my thoughts from the last time this argument came around, which it does every three or four years whether we need it or not.

So:

If you’re a writer, and you don’t like fanfic, either with regard to your own works or in general:

Don’t waste breath and ink and internet connectivity telling fanfic writers that what they do is morally wrong, because they aren’t going to agree with you.

Likewise, don’t bother telling them that it’s illegal, either, because some of them won’t care and others of them won’t agree with you, and these days — because fanfiction in its modern form has been around for several decades now — some of the people in the latter group are in fact lawyers, and will be happy to debate legal theory with you for as long as breath and ink and internet connectivity hold out.

Your best bet is to state plainly that the whole idea of fanfic about your universe and characters really and truly deeply squicks you out, and that you really wish that people wouldn’t do it. This will, oddly enough, stop a lot of people, and will convince at least some of the ones that it doesn’t stop to keep the stuff hidden away where you don’t have to see it. Which is, frankly, about as good an outcome as you can reasonably hope for.

If you’re a fanfic writer:

Don’t waste time you could be spending on writing and reading fic in arguing with vehemently anti-fanfic pro writers. It’s an emotional thing, and you won’t convince them any more than they’ll convince you.

If an otherwise sane and rational writer says he or she doesn’t want fanfic written about his or her work, at least consider not writing it. Or at the very least, don’t go out of your way to write it just because their arguments got your back up, because spite is a lousy reason for writing something. And if the muse is riding you hard and you just can’t stop yourself, at the very very least don’t wave the resulting fic around in places where the writer can’t help but take notice of it.

Also — it’s pretty much never a good idea to send a copy of your fanfic to the author in question. Even if they’re known to be kindly disposed toward the idea of fanfic in general, their reaction to fanfic about their stuff in particular is not to be relied upon — they may find it embarrassing, or may feel obliged to object to it for legal reasons regardless of their actual feelings, or may be concerned that reading someone else’s interpretations of the material will influence them unduly.

Common sense, people.  Exercise it.

On a Summer Day…

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

On a summer day just after finishing up a long-term project, it’s hard to think of anything substantive to say.

The final push to the deadline is an intense and exhausting thing, but one of the blessings it brings with it is a tightening of focus — stuff that isn’t The Book recedes from the forefront of your awareness so you can concentrate on the project at hand. Then you’re done, and as soon as the immediate post-finish adrenaline high subsides, everything else comes rushing back in.

I find that I’m usually in puppet-with-cut-strings mode for at least twenty-four hours after a deadline push.  At such times, I’m grateful for the slow cooker in the kitchen, which lets me put dinner together in the cool of the morning while I’m still as lively as I’m going to get under the circumstances.  Slow cookers make great writer tools.

Beadwork

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Some writers can tell the story straight through in the right order, the first time out of the starting gate.  So far as I can tell, they see the end state of the plot waiting up ahead of them like the finish line, and once they start writing they drive on toward it.

I envy these people, because I am one of the other ones — the writers who see the story bit by bit, one component scene at a time, and not always in the right order.  For us, the finished novel often resembles not the record of a straight race to THE END, but a box full of brightly-colored beads that must be strung together in a way that makes sense.

Figuring out how to do the stringing, though, can be interesting.  Both Word and WordPerfect have Master Document functions that allow a series of files to be chained together into one long document, but when it comes to figuring out the actual order of those files, the user is on his or her own.  More than once in the past, I’ve had to resort to writing one-or-two sentence summaries of the files’ content on 3×5 cards, then physically laying out the cards in different orders and arrangements until I’ve found one that works.

Recently, though, I’ve taken to using Scrivener for my initial draft work, because its functionality emulates in electronic form what I used to do with those 3×5 cards.  It lets me work on individual scenes or chapters, and allows me to move them around and re-order them at will, and then will compile them into a single file for saving in a variety of formats.

(Then I take the large, compiled file over into WordPerfect for final editing and formatting, because they will take away my Reveal Codes window when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.)

Quick and Easy Deadline Dinners #1

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Or, what Hamburger Helper wants to be when it grows up.

Pasta with Sweet Sausage and Cream

8 sweet Italian sausages, removed from their casings
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 cups of heavy cream
2 tablespoons Cognac, optional
1 pound shell pasta

Place sausages and minced onion in a saucepan and cook over low heat until sausage is lightly browned. Break up the meat with a fork as it cooks, so it is crumbly. Add cream and cook until thickened. Heavy cream will never curdle, so it doesn’t matter if the cream comes to a low boil. It will thicken more quickly. Add cognac. Stir sauce gently through cooked pasta and serve.

This one is about as close to a no-brainer as a recipe can get.  When you’ve got a writing (or editing) job that absolutely has to get finished, plus a family that absolutely has to get fed — and deli-meat sandwiches or takeout Chinese for some reason aren’t in the cards — this dish will come through for you every time.

(Save it for emergencies, though, for your heart’s sake.  It’s not a dish you want to put on the table every day.)

Revision Research Weirdness

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Today’s odd job:  Invoking the awesome power of the internet in order to determine whether or not the closed and abandoned 86th Street Station on the commuter train line in to Grand Central could be used to gain access to the street above.

Our editor had queried this, since the stairs leading up from the old platform are covered at street level by secure hatches.

We eventually found a photo reference showing one of the hatches standing open, with the panic bar on the underside clearly visible.  Victory!

(All this, in the service of about three paragraphs whose sole purpose is to get our protagonist from point A to point B without being spotted by the people who are watching for him at all the regular exits.  But here as elsewhere, God is in the details.)

Thought for the Day: Publishing Woes

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Publishing isn’t dying, but it’s certainly going through some major traumatic changes resulting from cumulative changes in technology that are in the process of doing for ink-and-paper printing what movable type did for the scriptorium. Writers, as usual, stand to get all kinds of shafted, but there’s nothing new about that: any change in the status quo of the publishing industry is going to shaft the writers, because they’ve got their business survival methods all carefully worked out and tweaked to work with the way things got left by the last set of traumatic changes.

It’s no coincidence that one of the oldest poems in Old English, Deor, is essentially a poet complaining that the Hot New Guy has shown up and started scooping all the good patronage. The Wikipedia article on the poem says that “attempts at placing this poem within a genre are quite difficult,” but that’s probably because very few working scholars of Anglo-Saxon are also free-lance novelists.

Take It Where You Can Find It

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Good writing advice can be found in all sorts of places.

This page, for example, features a set of maxims for stage magicians.  Some of them are fairly magic-specific (“Look after your hands and nails. Make sure they are clean or painted”); others, though, hold true for anyone working in the arts and entertainment fields (“Making things as easy as possible for your audience comes before making things as easy as possible for yourself.”)

Though I suspect it never hurt a writer to have clean nails, either.